My first few days of work went really well. On Monday, Matt and I were supposed to be there at 8:30 for orientation, so we left around 7:50, not really knowing how long it would take. When we pulled in the parking lot at 8:10, we knew we were a little early. Almost no one else was there. We staying in the car until 8:20 or so, then we went inside and sat in the lobby. Eventually some more people arrived, and we were able to sign in and get temporary badges. Jo came downstairs, met us at the front desk, and took us up to the office.
Jo very bubbly and friendly, so she was happy to see us starting work. She’s pretty short (5-2 or so?), about 27-28, and Phillipino. Jo’s job is to make things run smoothly at the office, and ensure that everyone is having a good time. Most recently, that involved creating the Findlaw Fun Committee and organizing a ping-pong tournament. We all received 100 Findlaw Fun Dollers to bet on the outcome. Now, I’m not exactly sure why we would bet with fake money (maybe there’s a prize for the person with the best bets), but at least we’re all having fun.
Our office is on the top floor of the building. Sounds exciting, until you realize that there are only two floors. Actually, it’s really nice. We have a lot of windows through which the sun can shine, and there’s so much space that they even have empy cubicles. Matt and I have cubes right next to each other in the middle of the far side of the office (there are meeting rooms and manager’s offices between the two sides). When I enter the office every day, I turn left, put my lunch in the refrigerator (I have to squeeze it in between the free drinks), maybe pick up a granola bar and glass of water, turn right around the corner and walk past one set of cubicles before I get to where I work.
Anyway, back to our first day. Jo was supposed to help us get set up with our accounts so we could report hours, etc., but we ended up not being in the system yet, so we had to give up for the day. This left Matt and me some time to get set up on our computers and check out the building. I wrote an email to Michelle (another friend of mine who interned at Thomson West last year, but now is working at a subsidiary of theirs in Washington D.C.). Michelle took Chinese II this semester, so she and I regularly exchange emails in untoned pinyin. We probably have terrible grammar, but at least it’s a good review.
Eventually, Matt and I were able to meet with Rob, Chris, and Kuba to talk about our project for the summer. We had three choices for what to work on: one project involved analyzing and potentially catagorizing news feeds that FindLaw buys from another company to editorialize and resell, a second project was helping to rewrite some legacy code to provide a consistant interface across the organization, and the third option would be to create a tool that would help people create relationships between different taxonomies. Matt and I talked over our options and both agreed that project number one sounded like it was both the most interesting problem and the one with the greatest possibility for our input to shape the output of the project. In the afternoon, we met with Kuba again and told him our decision.
Actually, I just realized I haven’t explained who these people are. Kuba is Wlodek Kubalowski (I think/hope this is right), the CTO of FindLaw. Kuba is probably in his late 40s to 50s, and moved to America from Poland around 1990. Rob works under Kuba, and his title is Director of Technology. I haven’t worked with him a whole lot, so I don’t know much more than that. Chris Wensel is the Chief Architect and my direct supervisor this summer.
Chris is quite a character. He grew up in Texas, went to school in Texas, and finally was able to move out here in 2000/2001, a few months before the big crash. He’s also the least Texan person you can imagine – vegetarian, liberal, long hair, etc. Chris is a great guy, though. He’s very intelligent and knows a lot about the software business (having payed his way through college by starting a software company). I think I have much to learn from him this summer.
My first day, I went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant with Chris and two other coworkers of mine: Gloria Lau and Jarred. Gloria moved to the US from Hong Kong to go to school. Now she has her doctorate; this was actually her first day back after presenting at a conference in Scotland . Jarred grew up in the Bay Area, went to school in Chicago, and moved back after the company that he was working at in Chicago was bought by Thomson/Findlaw. I’m not 100% sure what Gloria and Jarred work on at Findlaw. Pretty much the first thing that anyone said at lunch was when Chris declared that Matt and I had better stop wearing khakis and getting dressed up for work. Pretty much everyone at FindLaw wears jeans every day. Sometimes they even just wear jeans and a t-shirt. It’s a lot more relaxed than last year, and I like it this way.
When we got back to the apartment after our first day of work, Matt’s mom was waiting with homemade enchiladas for us. That was really nice. Dinners were a lot tastier when she was staying here…
Tuesday started out kind of slow. Matt and I weren’t able to meet with Chris to go over the project until the afternoon, so we spent the morning looking up academic articles online about automatically classifying text corpuses and news feeds. At lunch, we went to downtown Sunnyvale again, but this time we ate at Roundtable Pizza.
After lunch, we had a meeting with Chris, Gloria, and another coworker, Tompa. Chris gave us more details about how news articles were currently being handled and where they came from, but mainly he said it was our job to figure out the specifics of how this process worked. Our first step was talking to Tompa, who would help us install some software that he wrote to start dumping news articles to disk.
Tompa is another older Polish man, but he’s not as high in the company as Kuba. His accent is also much stronger… He’s very friendly and talkative, but we can only understand about half of what he says. One day Matt and I were working late, so almost everyone else was gone. Tompa saw us at the water fountain and stopped to talk for a while. Matt and I both heard Tompa ask, “Are you… running?” Neither one of us, however, really knew how to answer the question. At first I (and apparently Matt, too) thought he was asking if we were at work late because we were running a script that was taking a long time to finish, so we said, “No, we’re just working on some stuff.” Then it was his turn to look confused and repeat his previous question. I looked at Matt, he looked at me, and I ventured a guess that he had actually asked if we were renting, so I said “Yes, down in Cupertino.” Luckily I was right, but unfortunately Matt hadn’t caught up yet, so he was utterly lost. Later in the conversation, Tompa was telling us about something we should do, maybe something about Yosemite park, but we had to be careful because of something else… I talked to Matt afterward to see if he knew what we had been talking about, but apparently he had no idea either. I wish I could tell you that we eventually found out, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.
Anyway, Tompa had some java servlets that he had been running in Tomcat to subscribe to the Dialog feed. This meant that to completely emulate his work, Matt and I had to first install a Java IDE, then get it working with Tomcat, and finally start everything running. Nothing ever wants to work right the first time with this sort of setup, so this ended up taking us the rest of the day.
Wednesday, we finally thought we understood everything that Tompa’s code was doing, when Chris came by to see if we had it all set up on his linux box yet. Well, we didn’t realize that was where he wanted us to save the feed, so we had set it up on our Windows boxes. So we told him that and explained how setting up Tomcat and everything had taken up all our time. Chris seemed shocked that we even used Tomcat, and he told us that it would probably be better for us to rewrite it from scratch so it could just run as a Java proces… So, we started over. Thankfully, it wasn’t really that bad to rewrite now that we knew what all the different parts did, and we started dumping files to disk at 4:40 on Wednesday afternoon.
Wednesday night, Matt’s mom flew back home to Michigan. Matt drove her to the San Francisco airport, so I had the apartment to myself for a while. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to the time change yet, though, so I fell asleep pretty soon.
I think this is probably a long enough post for most of my readers, so I’ll stop here. In the next update, you can look forward to our first meeting with a very persistant Scientologist, the Cupertino library, hanging out with Apple interns, driving to Vallejo, and clothes shopping. Sounds like fun, right?
